The Devil's Music : I don't really like death metal (except I kind of do)
Patron Saint of this site Chuck Klosterman once said in a book blurb: “Every serious argument about music is ultimately a nonmusical manifesto - it’s 10 percent about aesthetics, 40 percent about how the respective arguers view the world, and 50 percent how these arguers view themselves.” This is important wisdom for metalheads, because it solves just about every conflict we’ve had since Vince Neil decided to put his sister’s clothes for a show.
We’ll never agree on anything, but it’s important to understand that musical differences are rooted in different factors than “your tastes are shit.”
Thirty-seven years old me has conflicted feelings about death metal, a subgenre that is supposed to embody complete fucking integrity: long hair, complicated guitar solos, guttural vocals, satanic or horror-based imagery, years of hard living on the road and dedication to the music alone. I find that extremely boring.
How did that happened exactly? Twelve year-old me fucking loved death metal. I remember the first time like it was yesterday: my cousin Erik and I were walking by a ratty apartment building when an older kid called us from a third floor window: “listen to this,” he said before turning his RCA boom box towards us. It was at that moment in my life that I realized there was an entire different musical universe than the one MTV was trying to sell us on.
“Is that Pantera?” Erik asked.
It was obviously not Pantera.
“It’s this new band Cannibal Cop,” said the kid.
The band wasn’t new and was actually named Cannibal Corpse, but this kind of mistake was common ground between French-speaking kids in a world without the internet. If it was new to us, it was new.
In the following years I discovered all the classic death metal bands you’re probably familiar with: Morbid Angel, Deicide, Suffocation, Cryptopsy and whatnot. I loved them all. They felt dangerous, forbidden. They were who our parents were terrified of. Glen Benton had branded an inverted cross on his forehead, making him irremediably a Satanist and a cultural boogeyman. These guys were the purest, most intense form of rock n’ roll there was.
Until they weren’t.
What happened to death metal
It’s simple and somewhat tragic: death metal fell in love with itself. It became the last refuge of the passionate, angry musician who wanted to push the physical boundaries of their instrument. That in a nutshell isn’t exactly a problem, but it became the only important thing in the subculture. I chose a Necrophagist video to showcase how lifeless and interchangeable the sound had become, but I could’ve use a hundred other semi-popular death metal bands.
The reason why I got into death metal in the first place is non-musical. It’s also the same reason why I get into specific bands, more than I get into specific genres: it broke the rules. Transcended social boundaries. I liked the music because it was an explicit and adequate “fuck you” to a way of life I rejected before I understood what rejecting a way of life meant. If I liked death metal so much, it’s because it reflected a art of me that I was discovering.
Sure, the music was important. But the transgressions, the secrecy and the underlying feeling of danger also were. These last three things completely disappeared from death metal after the turn of the millennium. The genre became the last refuge or angry, misunderstood virtuoso who all claimed they would’ve been a Mozart or a Paganini type in the nineteenth century. People who were all alike and more important: completely unlike me.
Death metal had developed its own brand of conformity. But when you develop your own culture and conformity, you also automatically develop a counterculture.
The exciting world of slam
Little did I know, I was not alone feeling this way. An entire undercurrent of musicians felt thoroughly disinterested in mastering their instruments and dedicated themselves to utter fucking brutality instead. These beautiful people kind of accidentally founded an subsubgenre of death metal called slam after hearing the utmost brutal guitar riff on the 1991 song Liege of Inveracity by New York brutal death metal legends Suffocation. Skip to 2:50 if you want to hear it.
What makes slam so much more fun than traditional death metal? There are several factors:
1) The emphasis on KILLER guitar riffs and mid-tempo grooves, which are the bedrock of great heavy metal songwriting.
2) The ridiculously cavernous and incomprehensible lyrics. Although most slam bands do have lyrics, the genre uses voice primarily like an instruments. The lyrics are also often fucking disgusting so I’m OK with not understanding them.
3) A complete lack of self-seriousness. Lyrics are usually weird, off-putting medicolegal jokes, which only highlight the lack of importance it has in the genre. There is so pretty wild misogyny going around in the genre, but I try not to pay attention to these bands.
4) The pure dedication to brutality is somewhat of a dare between the bands, which keeps the genre fresh and evolving. The last Devourment album felt like a cheat code, but I’m just waiting for the next band to up the ante. It’s fun, more good-natured than black metal and keeps going in all sorts of wild and unpredictable directions.
This is not exactly a binary thing. Slam is a reaction to death metal’s staleness, but it kind of bred a plethora of wild and creative subgenres like: brutal death metal (sometimes they are considered one an the same, although they have differences), war metal, cavernous death metal and all the weird offshoots of goregrind. So, I kind of like death metal, but not the kind of death metal that is trying to claim its place in society.
Whatever you think about them, my reasons are clear and are mine and mine alone: if it doesn’t say “fuck you” loud enough, it’s not death metal to me.
